Before Elmar and I left for our summer in Germany, a lot of our friends in Texas wished us well on our “European Adventure”. I haven’t been here since 2011, yet it feels too familiar to be an “adventure”. Many Americans see Europe as a luxury destination, but I see it as “home 2.0”.

Now that our house in Austin is done, Elmar checks out the real estate market in Oerlinghausen

In the past 24 hours, I have learned that I will officially teach German again next year at UT, I received a DAAD German Studies Research Grant for research this summer in Germany, and I had presentation proposals accepted to the POD Conference for educational developers and the ACTFL Conference for foreign language instructors.

We’re also really close to passing the final house inspection for the certificate of occupancy. We’ve been living there since Februrary (shh! don’t tell!), and it just gets better every day.

“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”
― Grantland Rice

When playing roller derby, my feelings of success are often not directly tied to the final score. If I played well with my team, if we communicated and implemented strategy, I feel great even when we lose. Conversely, if I couldn’t put my body where it needed to be on the track, or if I couldn’t get through the pack as a jammer, I feel like rubbish even if my team won.

Weirdly, I experienced both of these scenarios recently in my academic life.

Here are some photos of my home study space over the course of the last 3-4 weeks. On Wednesday, I finally completed a space that has both a (camping) table and chair AND a bookshelf where I’ve organized resources relevant to my doctoral exams. Before that, I was moving around between the office and guest bedroom, depending on where Elmar was installing carpet. I even used the bathroom to house my bookshelf!

I’m actually excited to take my doctoral exams. No really. I have been absolutely geeking out about aspects of my topics with committee members, other faculty and other grad students.

Source: http://www.geeknewwave.com/article/geek-out-week-3222013

To some extent, I’ve been doing the things I set out to do to prepare for my exams. I still need to pump up steps 1 and 2, but I’m in a good place. It’s weird, I feel like I could study for another 8 months and still not have everything down, but that’s not the point.

The point is to socialize me into my field, to accelerate the process of exploring diverse bodies of literature and synthesizing them, and to formally assess my ability to articulate this synthesis in writing and orally. And in the process, I’ll be teaching my committee members, who are all experts in something, but not everything with regards to my interdisciplinary topic.